MORE than a century ago, as competition from the United States and Germany threatened the British empire — resulting 20 years later in the carnage of the first world war — William Morris put his politics into words.

“I call myself a Communist, and have no wish to qualify that word by joining any other to it.

“The aim of Communism seems to me to be the complete equality of condition for all people; and anything in a Socialist direction which stops short of this is merely a compromise with the present condition of society, a halting-place on the road to the goal.”

“The complete equality of condition for all people” best sums up the political aspirations of millions of our people.

It is there in the fight for wages that permit a decent life and in the desire for water, energy, public transport and mail to be publicly owned and run in the interests of all.

It exists among all angered at the privileges of the rich and the immunities that flow from extreme wealth.

It makes sense to the homeless, the millions living in overcrowded accommodation and paying “market” rents. For young people starting a family the idea of housing allocation based on need and publicly owned housing at reasonable rents is the most practical alternative to the “property-owning democracy” which excludes them.

It is almost universally held by people who rely on the NHS and even by many who are forced, in extremis, to pay for healthcare delivered for profit.

For parents of school-age children, students in further and higher education, young workers on a training pathway and every graduate burdened by a mountain of debt the idea of a comprehensive system of education free to all and organised on the basis of full equality is almost beyond imagining.

On the public ownership of utilities etc, even a majority of past Tory voters and many present Reform UK voters agree with the decisive majority of voters as a whole that public ownership of public goods is a good thing.

In fact, decisive numbers of Reform UK voters are broadly in favour of public ownership, are hostile to class distinctions and critical of the rich, to the point where they could be described as “class conscious” in their basic outlook.

And we can be absolutely sure that these ideas have currency among the millions of non-voters whose eruption into politics over recent years was brought about only by the opportunity to cast a decisive vote in the referendum on EU membership and later by the groundbreaking Labour manifesto of 2017.

The peculiar political system we have in our country gives little opportunity for these ideas to crystallise in the programmes of political parties and when we find echoes of them — Labour’s much-deferred, constantly modified and rarely implemented employment law reforms being the most salient contemporary example — are never systematically implemented.

Embedded in the official public political discourse, rarely directly articulated but always present, is the idea that profound change is impossible, that politics is about compromise around the margins, that the structures of wealth and power, even when acknowledged, are immutable and that consensus must be the aim of parties who alternate in government.

This kind of politics is dying before our eyes with the death blows delivered to a fractured Tory Party that now commands the provisional allegiance of just 18 per cent with their former coalition partners, the Lib Dems on 15 per cent. The Labour Party just about holds on to 23 per cent.

The nationalists have a substantial implantation — in Wales, with 1 per cent, where they present themselves as in opposition to Establishment politics and less so in Scotland where the SNP on 3 per cent are more clearly part of the Establishment.

The Greens on 11 per cent have been able, in some senses deservedly so, to collect protest votes and the support of those who want a radical alternative.

But the two most dynamic elements in the new politics are the rise of Reform UK, on 26 per cent, having cannibalised the Tory vote and corralled a fair proportion of non-voters, including people we have previously defined a “natural” Labour voters and, in recent days, the new party of the left being brought into being at the initiative of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.

The resurgence of left-wing politics — heralded by the mass of voters accumulated in 2017 around the Labour manifesto and today expressed in the surge of support for a new party of the left — draws on deep disillusionment with the previous cross-party consensus at Westminster. This pervasive feeling — that Britain had been going in the wrong direction for decades and that these feelings, taken with the simultaneous collapse of Labour and the Tories in the polls — is stronger.

The critically important point is that these impulses are not exclusively expressed in left-wing terms and that one of their effects is to drive the current poll lead of Reform UK.

Where the Star argues that this comprehensive rejection of the post-Thatcher political settlement is in reality a rejection of privatisation, deregulation and deindustrialisation it identifies both opportunities and dangers for the working-class movement.

The great opportunity lies in the rejection of the reactionary tradition of class collaboration identified with the Labour right that was so bound up with Britain as the guardian of the collective interests of US and British capital in the neoliberal European Union.

While it is true that the racist operation of the EU’s “Fortress Europe” policy, the intensifying neoliberal character of its economic policies and its dangerous militarism has eroded some of the liberal illusions which affect a section of the left there remains substantial illusion about the EU.

Fissures between Trump’s US and the EU reflect the maturing of long-established inter-imperialist rivalries. These breaches are an opportunity for everyone on these islands who wants an independent and ethical foreign policy based on the rejection of war, nuclear disarmament, the repudiation of the Nato/EU war drive and an equitable relationship with our former colonies and the global South as a whole.

That achieving these aims cannot be disentangled from a socialist economic policy based on shifting taxation on to wealth as well as income and on the reconstitution of an equitable welfare state this inevitably entails a confrontation with finance capital, the big banks, the City and big business.

It is here that it is possible to engineer a rupture between many of the people who see Reform UK as an alternative to the present discredited system and the clique of entitled City spivs and predatory chancers who make up the the leadership of Nigel Farage’s outfit.

This cannot be a problem-free process and it must entail a popular critique of the exploitative character of capitalist immigration policies and the complicity of government and employers in substituting imported labour for the gaps in the labour market brought about by the mismanagement of our own economy. This must be coupled with a class-based approach to winning equitable wages and conditions for the entire working class.

Winning workers to understand that equal rights for migrant workers is in their interest and an expression of working-class internationalism and solidarity is a big ask. But it is necessary in making a distinction between workers trafficked by employers and government — the great majority of migrants — and much smaller number of people arriving by small boats.

These people are largely refugees fleeing war and climate change and for whom we owe both human sympathy and solidarity born of our country’s responsibility in creating the conditions which drives their exodus.

The success last weekend in challenging fascist provocateurs in Epping points to an essential element in our strategy but confrontation on the streets is not enough.

On present numbers the new left party looks on being able to count on up to 1,000 supporters in every constituency. Clearly there will be more in working-class and urban areas but everywhere there are the human resources to campaign in every community and workplace on all of these issues.

A political party that is focused on campaigning around the basic economic and class questions which concern working Britain will inevitably draw into its orbit the most organised sections of the working class, trade unionists and socialists.

It will have to navigate divisive questions around all manner of moral, social and ethical questions on which working people differ even when they agree on the basics. After the poisonous police regime of the Starmer Labour Party and the toxic internal cultures of the ultra-left there is a strong commitment to a tolerant and democratic internal regime and little tolerance for factional scheming.

It is clear that we are in something of a new situation in which a sharper challenge to Establishment politics and class collaboration is possible.

But to return to the questions raised by William Morris, we need to consider how these new developments relate to a socialism that rests on the working-class conquest of political and state power.